Panel of the Week 7/28/10

Welcome back to Panel of the Week where we take a look at some of the most noteworthy panels from this week’s comics. This week, what is supposed to be a slow week right after comic-con, was packed with great stuff. We have a beautiful butterfly Thing, clown-faced violence (a given), Wolverine has joined the party, a cowboy alien caterpillar, and the X-Men sweep up.

Ultimate Mystery #1
Ultimate Fantastic Four had some real highs and lows during its run. I’m a sucker for anything Pascal Ferry draws though so maybe I’m misty water colored memory -ing the whole series. One thing that never completely jived was the relationship between the Four. Johnny and Ben is easy to get right but I never felt like Reed or Sue ever felt their voices. The final straw for the Ultimate Fantastic Four is going down now. Reed is dead (maybe, I doubt it), Ben takes a shot at Sue, and then Ben loses his rocks and can now turn into a shining being of light at will. Can’t roll eyes harder.

Artifacts #1
And I’m hooked. I don’t know most of the characters in this book, including Aphrodite here, but the setup is good. I’m sometimes afraid of deep continuity but I always appreciate when a publisher creates a world where all its books coexist. Marvel and DC have sprawling universes, Image has carved a nice little world around Invincible, and now Top Cow will bring together its licenses via the powerful weapons that many of them wield. I’m on board. Oh, Aphrodite just murdered the Witchblade’s sister right in front of the Witchblade’s daughter.

FrankenCastle #19
What a tremendous issue! This is a continuation of the fight that started over in Dark Wolverine just last week. In part two we have Tony Moore drawing 22 pages of booby traps, stabbings, explosions, and filthy brawling. Small spoiler here but in the final pages Logan shows up and it’s one of the few times I’m actually excited at the prospect.

Action Comics #891
We’re going to discuss this issue over in Comic Book Club but I just had get this panel on here. This is the telepathic alien caterpillar known as Mister Mind. He is holding Lex Luthor’s robot Lois Lane assistant hostage with a six shooter in a wild west saloon. All of this is a semi-guided hallucination by Luthor himself. Make sure you read the word bubbles here. Thank you, comics.

Uncanny X-Men #526
There are two things happening in this scene that I have to comment on. One is that comic writers, but I’m starting to feel like Marvel writers in particular, have fallen in love with the rubble cleanup scene. Granted, this backup story is actually titled “Rebuilding” so maybe it should get a pass. This scene has become the standard in epilogue issues presumably so we can have super people doing super things even when there’s no one around to punch because the bad guy went down last issue. The second thing is that Colossus has the wrong arm in a sling. I’m sure the accelerated shipping schedule of the Second Coming event was to blame here but it stuck in my craw anyway since for me seeing his steel arm get snapped was one of cringe-worthiest scenes of the whole event.